Weighing the pros and cons of content Syndication

What is Content Syndication?

The concept of syndication isn’t unique to web content marketing. It likely began around 1865, when print newspapers reigned supreme. Content syndication is the process of pushing your blog, site, or video content out into third-party sites, either as a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail. The idea is to drive more engagement with your content by wiring it into related digital contexts, either to boost traffic to your owned property or just get exposure for your brand or your key personalities or products. Read more about content syndication on our blog “How content syndication can be more than just a traffic boost.”

Pros and Cons of Content Syndication:

Exposure to Target Audience:

Pros: Being in the era of internet where possibly every business is present over the net, being visible to the target audience can be actually challenging. Marking your presence over the net Content Syndication helps your brand to come in front and be visible to the audience. With the potential to give your content a viral effect, few content syndication websites give your content an exposure to their huge social media followings.

Cons: Finding a right partner for content syndication is the way to harder than you think, that is why many of the companies prefer to hire for content syndication services. Moreover there are very few websites that are reliable for content syndication, unfortunately, there are many websites offering content syndication that don’t have a good syndication program and will repurpose your content as their own, instead.

Travels Fast:

Pros: With all the pros and cons of content syndication,one of the biggest advantages of content syndication is that syndicated content travels fast. Giving your content multiple platforms to share, through content syndication you can reach a wider audience in short time. Time is a precious commodity, especially for marketers. Content syndication is a great and easy way to get access to a larger audience with little work on your part.

Cons: If your content does not deal with a topic that is static or never changing then you will have to deal with the problem of your content becoming outdated over the time. Unfortunately, when you syndicate your article to other sites, you usually lose control over your article since it is typically hosted on someone else’s website. In fact, if you’re particularly successful in getting other sites to publish your article, your article may be on hundreds of websites across the Internet. You no longer have the freedom to simply edit the article to update. Instead of increasing your brand awareness, these contents can damage your reputation.

Boosts your SEO:

Pros: Ultimately boosting your SEO, when used smartly content syndication gives you the scope to add backlinks to your website as well as allows you to control the anchor text in the link. Google counts a site’s importance by the number of links pointing to it. Adding links helps you increase your page rank on Google.

Cons: In some cases when your syndicated content has higher authority, your duplicate content can outrank your own website. Google highly discourage duplicate content and could potentially lower your ranking because of that. Even though there is various type of content marketing metrics and strategies that can be used to deal with the pros and cons of content syndication.

Lead Generation:

Pros: Adding on to the increased visibility you get better reach to the target audience, accumulating your chances of capturing more leads. Republishing your content exposes you to your target audience giving them the ability to reach out to you with an ease. When you syndicate your content through publishers you can increase the chance of improving your likelihood to score Leads.

Cons: Content syndication pros and cons are very contradictory. While your overall lead generation numbers will most likely increase, you may be sacrificing the quality of interested leads. Because these leads are not present on your website, it may be harder to convert them the same way you would for leads on your website. If your sales team suddenly begins struggling with unqualified leads, it’s probably wise to implement a lead scoring program or lengthen your landing page forms to maintain the lead quality.

Unspoken Publicity:

Pros: While syndicating your content, oftentimes you are able to include Call-To-Action as well as links back to your website or social media handles in your author bio or within the copy of your content.

Cons: One of the most vicious facts about content syndication that bothers the marketers is duplicate content. There are both pros and cons of content syndication, you re-publish your content on a constant basis in content syndication, in a way duplicating your own content in various content syndication networks. One of the best ways to overcome this is to collaborate with websites that are reputed and highly professional. These websites do not hamper your content and make sure you remain the original source of the content they are syndicating.

Brand Building:

Pros: With effective content syndication you can also be regular syndication partner with the sound publishers and utilize a better syndication network. Republishing your content on these reputed and high-authority websites puts you among the leaders within your industry and boosts your brand reputation. When your articles are published by numerous websites and newsletters across the web, with your name or company’s name displayed in the byline of those articles, one major benefit is that your name becomes well-known.

Cons: Syndicating your content is not a simple submit and forget process. Another problem that marketers usually encounter while syndicating contents is that the webmasters that publish your article sometimes feel that they have a right to edit your article, even if you have explicitly forbidden this in the license that you issued them. What they do instead is divide your content into various pages in order to save more space for advertising. Sometimes they also change the links on your content to point to their own affiliate links.

Now that we have weighed both sides discussing pros and cons of content syndication, you might have realized that is not everyone’s cup of tea. Content Syndication comes with a lot of strategic planning and tricks. Even though the cons seem a bit frightening you might want to take a look at the tips to overcome these cons in content syndication we shared.

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Author Vikas Bhatt

Vikas is the co-founder of OnlyB2B ITES Pvt Ltd and a Demand Generation cum Data Cleansing Expert. He has 10+ years of experience in B2B Lead Generation, Data Mining, and Content Syndication.
Say hi on vikas.bhatt@only-b2b.com

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